I have written several times already about Pat Lucas, the friend whose funeral I attended this week. I am doing so again. It's a measure of her influence on me, and what her funeral made me think about Christmas.
The hymn at her funeral was an interpretation of the sermon Jesus gave in Nazareth at the start of his ministry, which is found in Luke 4, starting at verse 16. The critical section is actually when Jesus quoted from Isiah 61, saying:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.
At one level this is a claim to be the Messiah. It did not go down well.
At another level it was a summary of what his teaching was to be about.
Centuries of translation by a rich and powerful church has, according to some, left the meaning opaque.
The third line is unambiguous. Jesus' focus is on the poor. This reiterates the message in the so-called Magnificat in Luke 1, 46 and following. It seems the writer did not wish his audience to miss his point.
Other lines, though, have to be interpreted in this context, and especially the last two. The ‘oppressed' were those burdened by debt. The ‘year of the Lord's favour' was a Jubilee, when the slate was wiped clean on all debts, whoever they were between. Both represent the fear of debt so deeply implicit in the texts of the Old Testament. Call those debts the finance curse, if you like, because that was what they were.
I know this is how Pat saw this text, because we talked about it. More than that, it was how she interpreted her faith when giving it lived meaning. Even as her faith morphed into belief in a singular God for all people, with multiple paths to understanding, this remained her core belief.
Hers was a mission to the poor.
She demanded and end to the oppression of the finance industry.
She looked for a world free from the pernicious consequences of debt.
And she based that belief on the principle statement of explanation that Jesus gave for his mission. He died first upsetting the money changers in the Temple - the preserver of the currency of his day.
Pat knew what courage meant. Her uncle had been on Dachau for resistance activity, and survived it. She looked for courage in others. But it was always for a simple reason. She thought the ethical person had to bring good news to the poor and freedom from financial oppression.
Maybe Pat was most especially meant to be in Jersey at the time she lived there.
But suppose her message was universal? She did not demand conversion or faith. She was only interested in action. What if our politicians had a bias to the poor and a belief that they must relieve the oppression that debts can create? What sort of world would we live in?
That's just a thought for Christmas.
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Jesus advocated revolution, in fact, the same revolution we advocate today. He was protesting the ‘1%’ of his time. That was why he had to die. We, the 99%, are tasked with taking up our power to insist on the primacy of the ‘person-in-community’ over against the primacy of ‘money’.
That’s his message: all the churches and religions in the world are the compensatory consolation in. respect of our inability to achieve this’ evolutionary’ shift.
Something to look forward to, for those who think it doesn’t have to be this way:
https://lesleyriddoch.com/films
Oh yes
I like Lesley’s view of the world
Michael Hudson writes very interestingly about the link between forgiveness of sins and forgiveness of debts.
He says that Rome, unlike the civilisations of Mesopotamia had no Jubilee, and the land and wealth passed into fewer hands. When the Barbarians invaded, the poor had little to lose and something to gain by not resisting them.
https://jacobin.com/2021/12/michael-hudson-interview-debt-forgiveness-cancellation-ancient-rome-christianity
It sounds like Pat’s memory is a blessing.
Happy Christmas to you and your kin, Richard.
Thanks, Ian.
And to you.
Richard,
I find Christmas a very difficult time. I have been faith free my whole life, and at this time of year I always reflect, in secret, the juxtaposition of this festival of greed and glitter, with the life of Jesus who teachings would rather seem to council against this orgy.
Once in the last seventy years I found myself alone at Christmas, I couldn’t get a flight home. Instead of mother, partner, or wife determining how I would spend it I had a choice. I fasted. It seemed the only rational choice.
In a few hours my wife and I will join her children in Glasgow’s most expensive restaurant for a Christmas meal. I will behave as expected. I will not jump on the table and scream ‘What has this got to do with Jesus!’
Ventilation over.
I wish you, your family, and all the readers of this excellent blog a very happy Christmas.
“The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.” – Thomas Paine
I think ‘oppression’ is a good word for the form of power Government and BoE have handed to the banks (consciously or not – I do not believe central bankers or politicians really understand what they have done, or are continuing to do): and handed gratis to the commercial banks; effectively to use the power of digital technology, solely in the banks interest, effectively to remove ‘legal tender’ from public access by a mixture of seductive instant gratification (‘convenience’) and shutting down alternatives (closing branches, obliging customers to use digital technology, even in the branches still open, and slowly removing human contact from finance, and replacing it with bank determined rules); and thus make the public the financial prisoners of the banks.
I believe this is very, very, serious; but also that nobody cares.
Until it is too late.
Just to reinforce the proposition that legal tender is being squeezed out by the banks (using the excuse that the public have stopped using them); Statista reported in 2021 that the monthly number of ATM transactions had fallen from around 280m a month in 2016, to 98m in 2021 (down 65%), Other stats suggest variously the fall in the number of ATMs is between 30%-50%.
It may be said the banks are right, people do not use cash. The rebuttal is twofold.
1) The banks are forcing the pace as fast as possible. They are making it more difficult to use or access ‘legal tender’ as quickly as possible, in their own interest, while pushing hard the advantages in speed and convenience of digital transactions.
2) The banks only operate because they operate a licence for government. The regulatory insistence that the banks respect the obligation to provide a complete service to all; and to ensure ‘legal tender’ is universally available to all, through ATMs or branches. as well as the provision of a personal services has been reduced (ask anyone in more remote Highland/Island communities how universal the service is that is provided). Effectively, de facto the commercial banks are writing their own rules over what type of service is provided, in their interests alone.
Isn’t Keynes view of full employment also guided by the notion that achieving and maintaining full employment is crucial to promote economic stability and social welfare and reduce poverty ?
If we have a system where labour is no more than an ‘input’ to be exploited and significant unemployment and underemployment are not just tolerated but encouraged, it creates unacceptable social and economic costs, poverty, generally reduces incomes, and increases inequality.
The BoE’s insistence on creating recession to allegedly solve inflation represents the very worst of that primacy of money over the ‘person-in-community”.
“What if our politicians had a bias to the poor and a belief that they must relieve the oppression that debts can create?”
Shades of John Rawl’s thought experiment.
The current crop of politicos would need to develop empathy (that poor person over there…… that could be me… etc).
It won’t happen. They are incapable of imagining themselves in a different situation……..and then doing something about it.
I’d suggest that this is not just a UK problem – I see exactly the same in the EU’s 3 institututions – a total and complete detachement from most people’s lived-reality.
Still worth thinking about, even if to reveal their fatal weakness
The Rawlsian veil is expressed in a less developed way by ordinary folk: ” There but for the grace of God go I”… as someone commented to me after dropping a donation at the foodbank collection this morning.
Maybe the true story of Jesus is in the way he was discredited and disposed of by vested interests?
This message is so obvious to me that I wonder if there something seriously wrong with me to be honest. But that is what I see. And that to me is the kernel of the story to humanity – watch out – this can happen over and over again.
And as for the ‘resurrection’ – well – it give us hope when there is little we can do about wealth and its use of money and power, especially if we don’t see what the story of Jesus is really about and open our eyes.
The rich and the established Church prefer ‘resurrection’ to insurrection’ any day I bet.
Therefore the rich will inherit the earth as they seem to be increasingly doing and calling the shots, a world made in their image.
Just reading “The Master & Margherita” – the chapter called “Pontius Pilate” is highly relevant to what you are saying. The writer does a good job of showing that it was “the (religious) powers that be” which used the secular powers to get rid of a dissenting voice. Gosh, how often has that happened? almost a built in feature of much of human society – at least in our neck of the woods. That said, Graeber and Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything) show that it does not need to be like that & was not like that in “other necks of the woods”.
Indeed Mike and thank you for the suggested reading which – with some Christmas money – I will make an investment.
Merry Christmas.
The election of a Starmer led Labour government will not be bringing a Happy Christmas to the poor or the planet for one simple reason the belief the UK government needs to operate a balanced budget. This reveals a profound ignorance in regard to how a sovereign economy should operate! The following extract from this paper tells you this:-
“… at the zero lower bound, monetary policy alone could not guarantee price stability or return the economy to full employment and so fiscal policy once again had a key role to play in demand management, suggesting the need for coordination between the government and the central bank. What’s more, new “unconventional” monetary policy tools such as quantitative easing had fiscal implications, involving new risks for the state’s
consolidated balance sheet and affecting the management of government debt (Greenwood, Hansen, Rudolph, & Summers, 2014). The crisis demonstrated that financial conditions matter greatly for the transmission of monetary policy, spurring central banks’ deeper involvement in financial policy.”
Page 8, “Central Bank Independence Revisited: After the financial crisis, what should
a model central bank look like?” Ed Balls, James Howat, Anna Stansbury. April 2018.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/working.papers/x87_final.pdf
Jesus turned over the bankers’ tables. What would he be doing today?
As for the jubilee years, it’s one of things I bring up when evangelical acquaintances talk about old testament laws. They go very quiet at that point.
🙂
I think you will find that the commercial banks are amply, generously and hastily forgiven the ir debts, on your behalf; and that, on way or another, sooner or later the Government or the banks will make very sure that you are being singled out to pay for it.
“The Subversion of Christianity” by Jacques Ellul is interesting and illuminating on this and other ethical/religious matters.
Another interesting tome – thank you Steve and have a good Christmas.
Sometimes there is good news in respect of the “burden of Debt”. The Scottish Greens squeezed £1.5million out of this year’s Scottish budget to write off school meal debt. It’s a small amount of money , but what struck me was someone cared enough to say this is a problem for some poor families and we can sort it and “bring good news to the poor”. We just need more of these actions.
Agreed